Culture & Lifestyle

Fox News is not news

Problem with Fox “News”, cable channel, It’s not just what it is – it’s also what it isn’t.

It To be usually the supplier propaganda and misinformation. What is it Not is a source of “news” – at least not by any conventional definition.

According to Broockman and Kalla, when these Fox viewers watched CNN, they heard about all sorts of things that Fox didn’t tell them.

That’s one of the conclusions I draw from a Fascinating new study in which conservative Fox TV viewers got paid to watch CNN for a month. Research titled “The diverse effects of partisan media on viewer beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers” Conducted by a pair of political scientists: David Broockmanwho teaches at UC-Berkeley, and Joshua Kallateacher at Yale.

According to Broockman and Kalla, when these Fox viewers watched CNN, they heard about all sorts of things that Fox didn’t tell them. They processed that information. They received. They became more knowledgeable about what was really going on in the United States.

The experiment didn’t change their political preferences – certainly not just for a month. But it did slightly change their perception of some of the key issues and political candidates.

The study authors distinguish between “traditionally emphasized forms of media influence” such as agenda setting and framing, and what they call “partisan filtering”: selection selectively reports information on select topics, based on what benefits the network’s partisans, and ignores everything else.

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One lesson here is that Fox viewers have access to real news. Although verifying authenticity has been known to be a way to get people to believe in lies even strongerSimple news – and even opinionated news – remains subscribed.

But the biggest lesson for me was realizing that Fox viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed – they’re actually being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of “news-like” stuff, but they don’t learn about what’s really going on.

And this is where we in the mainstream media can do something useful: We can stop talking about Fox as if it were another form of news – and start talking about it completely. not news. It’s the opposite of news. It instead of news. It is the absence of news.

We could explain more clearly that news organizations are actually providing viewers with the information they need regardless of whether it harms or helps a particular cause or political party.

Actual, mainstream journalists have been too charitable to Fox over the years, partly because the network has employed some of them, and partly to maintain its politically neutral facade.

But the time has come to declare with certainty that Foxes are not news.

The study started with 763 loyal Fox News viewers on the far right, then randomly assigned 40 percent to a “treatment” group. That group is then paid $15 an hour to watch up to seven hours of CNN per week during September 2020, during prime time. Participants were given quizzes to make sure they were paying attention.

Traditional, fact-based journalists have been too philanthropic to Fox over the years, in part because the network has employed some of them.

It found that CNN and Fox covered significantly different things that month. The severity of Covid and the Trump administration’s failures to control it are “by far the most popular topics on CNN” — even as Fox downplayed it and praised Trump’s behavior. By contrast, Fox News spent 15,236 words discussing “Democrats/Biden support for radical racist ideology/protests,” in CNN’s 1,300 issue.

Research shows that groups that follow CNN are “more likely to view issues covered on CNN (COVID-19) rather than on Fox News (racism protests) as important.” The group was also “more likely to agree that if Donald Trump makes a mistake, Fox News won’t cover it.”

One particularly hopeful finding is that watching CNN made Fox viewers “fundamentally more supportive of voting by mail than a control group.” Both networks cover the topic extensively, with CNN emphasizing the truth about how secure it is, and Fox deceivingly deceiving its vulnerability to fraud. Republicans’ measures to block Democratic constituencies from voting and challenge their unsatisfactory results depend heavily on Republican voters believing the lies about Democrats engaged in a massive fraud.

(Notably, attitudes around race, climate change, and policy have remained unchanged.)

The study authors’ assertion that partisan bias occurs on both sides of the cable news spectrum is a misnomer in their report. Fox and CNN are not different news flavors, they are completely different things. News organizations that have any legitimate claim to that headline do not keep material information to the public based on either party’s interests. CNN – or MSNBC – may refute, but they’re still fundamentally fact-based. Fox does not. (MSNBC, like NBC News, is part of NBCUniversal.)

You could certainly argue – and so do I – that corporate news does its own kind of coverage filtering. There are all the things that the corporate media decide not to cover that independent journalists do, like poverty, mass incarceration, civilian casualties caused by the United States, the agenda of How Washington is skewed by money, and these days, almost everything is good news. for Biden.

But the mainstream media still bases its reports on evidence, not whim. It doesn’t hide the key elements of an ongoing story, under any circumstances. Fox can’t say the same.

You are reading the article Fox News is not news

at Blogtuan.info – Source: nbcnews.com – Read the original article here

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